n2316lala-
r nbx
LA LAbas LAol
BC-Katrina-Insurance Backlash, 1st Ld-Writethru,1106
Miles from New Orleans, others pay Katrina's price
Eds: CLARIFIES in penultimate graf that Marie Collins has been with Allstate for three years.
AP Graphic KATRINA INSURANCE
By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI
Associated Press Writer
AP Photos of June 22: NYBZ107-113
biz–topic:Investment;biz–topic:Product;
The letter begins: "We're writing to you with what we know is unfortunate news about your Allstate Insurance."
Startled, Marie Collins reached for her glasses, then a magnifying glass and pored over the letter, realizing with a sinking feeling this isn't a standard mailing from the company that insures her home.
It was a cancellation. Her home was being dropped, the letter said, because it's in the path of future hurricanes.
But Collins doesn't live in New Orleans or even Florida. She lives in New York City.
Hurricane Katrina may have made landfall on the Gulf Coast last year, but its impact is being felt hundreds of miles away, as insurers scramble to reduce their exposure to future catastrophes.
"It's outrageous," said Collins, who's lived 81 of her 83 years in the same house in the New York borough of Brooklyn, where a devastating hurricane hasn't hit since 1938.
Yet hers is one of 30,000 homes the nation's No. 2 insurer, Allstate Corp., is canceling in coastal counties of New York, citing the need to protect itself from future storms. Other major players are following suit: Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. is no longer writing new policies on the eastern half of Long Island, N.Y., while MetLife Inc. is requiring extra inspections and expensive storm shutters for new customers living within 5 miles of salt water.
It's a strategy of retreat that's unfolded before: After Hurricane Andrew in 1992, insurers drastically scaled back their presence in Florida, forcing residents into the expensive, state-run insurance pool. The difference is that now insurers are not just shedding policies in traditional hurricane targets such as Florida, but all along the eastern seaboard.
"My home is in the middle of Cape Cod. It's nowhere near the beach. But we're all being painted with the same brush," said Paul Covell, 67, who recently received his cancellation letter from the Hingham Mutual Group, a Massachusetts-based insurer that dropped 5,000 of its customers on the Cape.
Even though the Northeast has not had a direct hit in decades, the high replacement value of homes there makes it an especially vulnerable spot in an insurer's portfolio.
"Homes in Long Island (N.Y.) have gone up in the last five years between 60 and 70 percent. Believe me, our rates have not gone up by 60 or 70 percent," said Edward M. Liddy, chairman and chief executive of Northbrook-Ill.-based Allstate. "You look at our exposure and you say 'We want to have enough capital to protect and care for all our 17 million households across the country.' To do that, you may have to reduce your exposure in a small way in other areas."
Those in the industry stress that a single massive event like Katrina can wipe out years of savings, putting an entire company with policyholders all over the nation at risk.
Edward B. Rust Jr., chairman and CEO of State Farm Insurance Co., the nation's largest personal property and casualty insurer, used Andrew as an example. In 1992, a subsidiary of the Bloomington, Ill.-based company, State Farm Fire & Casualty, was the top insurer of homes in the country. Claims from Andrew consumed the accumulated profit since its founding in 1935.
"That's what these low frequency but high severity events can do. They eat up not just profit, but all the accumulated capital," Rust said. "And I'm not talking about just policies in Florida – but in Seattle, in North Dakota, in Maine, in New York."
One of the ironies of last year's storm is that insurance companies reported a record $43 billion profit in 2005 – an 11.7 percent increase over the previous year and the highest net income since 1991, according to the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group.
Insurers say profits tell only half the story: The property-and-casualty insurance industry was able to weather the huge losses resulting from Katrina because they were themselves insured. Half the $58 billion in insured losses resulting from last year's hurricanes were absorbed by reinsurers, companies that insure insurance companies, according to the institute.
Those same reinsurers are now sharply increasing their rates in all coastal areas, making it far more expensive to do business there.
But last year's record profit is also the fruit of the insurers' 14-year effort to insulate themselves from risk, beginning in 1992 when numerous insurers quit writing wind coverage in Florida. Two years later, the Northridge earthquake changed the landscape of earthquake coverage. Later, there were wildfires, mudslides and floods.
After each successive disaster, the industry added fine print to their policies, excluding more from their baseline coverage.
Increasing numbers of homeowners turned to state-run insurance pools, designed to be the insurer of last resort. Yet the Florida pool, known as Citizens Property Insurance Co., now receives 40,000 new applications a month. With 850,000 customers, the pool is soon expected to overtake State Farm as the state's largest insurer.
Up and down the East Coast, even those who are able to find insurance are finding they're now paying more for less.
For 23 years, New York City attorney Tom Talley insured his vacation home in the Hamptons for around $900 a year. This year, he decided to sell the residence and signed a contract to buy a different Hamptons home, a deal that nearly went sour when he almost failed to find insurance.
"I became panicked," said Talley, 62, who found a carrier the day before his closing, paying triple what he paid before. He's also getting less coverage: The policy – like many being written on the coast these days – includes a 2 percent hurricane deductible.
"The box of what type of risk they're willing to allow is getting narrower and narrower," said agent George Yates, an independent agent who sells insurance on Long Island and in the Hamptons.
Marie Collins says she understands the risk: As a girl in the 1920s, she planted a maple seed in her window box. It grew into a majestic tree, only to be toppled by one of the strong hurricanes that hit Brooklyn pre-World War II.
Her issue is loyalty: The house has been insured for 81 years – a period of time in which she's never put in a claim. It has been insured by several carriers during that time and by Allstate for the last three years.
"I've been their customer for years," she said of Allstate. "That should count for something."
jruklala-
r nbx
LA LAbas LAol
BC-Katrina-Women of the Storm,770
Group of New Orleans women coax lawmakers to visit city
By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI
Associated Press Writer
AP Photos DCSW101-105
WASHINGTON (AP) – "You ask us who we are? I'll tell you. We're nobody," said the handsomely coifed blonde from New Orleans.
Her self-effacing demeanor disarmed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who smiled and appeared relaxed as Anne Milling, 65, moved in for the kill.
"We're no one. We're a group of nonpolitical, nonpartisan ladies who are passionate about New Orleans. We're mothers and housewives and businesswomen – and we can't believe that 87 percent of the House of Representatives and 70 percent of the Senate have not come to see the devastation."
Five months after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, toppling New Orleans' aging levees and submerging 80 percent of the city, only 55 representatives and 30 senators have visited the decimated city. Pelosi is not among them.
Underneath the elegant conference room table in her House office, the California Democrat clenched her hands in her lap. She bit her lower lip. But Milling pressed on, and soon Pelosi was accepting a box of bonbons and an invitation for a 36-hour, expense-paid trip to New Orleans. "I'll be there," she said before the women walked out.
They only had six hours in the nation's capital, but the 140 women, who arrived by private jet Monday morning and left by dusk, succeeded in personally inviting some of the nation's most important power brokers to their hurricane-scarred city.
Dubbing themselves the "Women of the Storm," they argue that delays in federal aid to New Orleans are the result of so few lawmakers seeing the destruction up close.
"No TV clip does it justice," said attorney Sparky Arceneaux, 60, who shared a college dorm with first lady Laura Bush at Southern Methodist University in the 1960s.
Their message is not new, but their approach is different. While images of poor black residents stranded at the Superdome have become iconic of the storm, many middle- and upper-class neighborhoods also were flooded, yet received far less attention.
The women, who represent a Who's Who of New Orleans society, including celebrity chefs and noted authors as well as banker's wives and socialites, offer a starkly different image of Katrina's victims. Along with their designer bags and strings of pearls, they also carried bright blue umbrellas, symbolizing the tarps covering their homes' pockmarked roofs.
While most had no appointments, they used a combination of luck, impeccable manners and a dash of Southern charm to corner some of the nation's top decision-makers. And once inside congressional offices, the women drew on their rich personal histories to create a bridge where none existed before.
"They all want to talk football, even if just a little bit," said Olivia Manning, wife of former New Orleans Saints quarterback Archie Manning and mother of two current NFL quarterbacks, Peyton and Eli Manning. "But it helps get the door open," she said, her eyes twinkling, describing how the conversation with both Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and White House economic adviser Al Hubbard began with football banter.
And whenever they could, they used their personal loss to highlight the loss of the city as a whole.
In the office of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, New Orleans attorney Cheryl Teamer, 42, pulled out the before and after pictures of her ravaged house, which soaked for days in nearly 10 feet of flood water.
"Isn't that a beautiful home. Will you be able to salvage it?" asked Reid.
"Senator, there are homes like this all over the city," interrupted Verna Landrieu, the 73-year-old matriarch of one of Louisiana's political dynasties, which includes daughter Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., and son Mitch Landrieu, Louisiana's lieutenant governor, as well as husband Moon Landrieu, New Orleans' former mayor.
"Three of my children lost their homes. I come home crying every day. It's devastating," the elder Landrieu said.
Over glasses of cabernet on their return flight to Louisiana, they added up their successes – and future challenges. Almost all of them succeeded in giving out their invitations, and some had accepted unusual conditions in securing a politician's promise to visit New Orleans.
"He told me I would have to get three Republicans before he would come," Cecile Tebo, 45, said of her deal with Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif.
Tebo was walking the crowded aisle of the charter jet asking each row of women whether they had gotten any Republicans. By the end of the flight, she had counted 12 Republicans.
"So I figure that means he needs to bring four Democrats," she joked.
n5205lala-
r nbx
LA LAbas LAol
BC-Katrina-Six Months Later,1944
Half a year later, New Orleans is far from whole
Eds: Also moved in advance on state and national wires. An interactive will be offered in which Gulf Coast residents speak about the rebuilding process six months after Hurricane Katrina. The interactive will be slugged katrina–sixmonths and will be available in the –national folder on Monday, Feb. 27.
With BC-Katrina-New Orleans-Glance, BC-Katrina-Six Months Later-Landmarks
AP Graphic KATRINA SIX MONTHS
By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI
Associated Press Writer
AP Photos of Feb. 23: NU300-335
NEW ORLEANS (AP) – They're throwing Mardi Gras beads again – so many strands, they're landing in tree branches and getting snagged on the trellised balconies of the French Quarter.
You'll find them adorning the arms of Spanish statues. Tourists are wearing them, but these days so are contractors and the National Guard. It's hard to walk on Bourbon Street without stepping on them. You're likely to crunch them underfoot, long necklaces of plastic pearls brightening the asphalt.
At the corner of Bourbon and St. Peter, Pat O'Brien's is once again serving its syrupy, yet potent Hurricane cocktail. At Tropical Isle, you can get an equally potent Hand Grenade in a tall, plastic go-cup.
But walk to the end of Bourbon Street, take a left on Esplanade Avenue, a right on Rampart Street and head east. At first, the debris comes in bits: A small pile of siding. A rusted box spring. One taped-up refrigerator. At first, you find them in neat piles, in the front yard or outside on the curb.
There's still a semblance of order. But keep going. It gets worse.
You pass an elegant sofa, the kind you might imagine a grand dame reclining in, sipping her mint julep. It is lodged in the middle of an intersection. A few miles farther, the innards of rotting houses spill out on both sides of the road.
Six months have passed since Katrina ravaged this city. For a half a year, its people have counted the dead (officially, 1,080 in Louisiana and 231 in Mississippi) and struggled mightily to keep their city among the living.
A slimmed-down Mardi Gras is testament to their success; a tour of the devastation that remains is testament to how far they have to go.
Hurricane Katrina created an estimated 60.3 million cubic yards of debris in Louisiana, 25 times as much as the ruins of the World Trade Center and enough to fill the Superdome more than 13 times. Of that, only 32 million cubic yards – a bit more than half – has been removed.
Meanwhile, there are just under 2,000 people listed as missing. Some are not missing at all – they turned up, but their families never notified authorities. Hundreds of others, though, were very likely washed into the Gulf of Mexico or swept into Lake Pontchartrain or alligator-infested swamps, according to Dr. Louis Cataldie, Louisiana's medical examiner. Still more may be buried in the rubble.
At a hurricane morgue near Baton Rouge, 86 bodies remain unidentified. State officials are trying to reach relatives for another 74 who've been identified but have no place to go.
Mayor Ray Nagin says a comparison to New York City should be a favorable one. "Let me remind you that after 9/11 in New York, it took them six to eight months to get out of the fog of what happened to them. And to date, there's still a big hole in the ground. So when I look at everything that's going on, I think we're right on schedule," he said.
Indeed, in the French Quarter and on St. Charles Avenue, on Magazine Street and in the plantation-style mansions of Uptown, life has moved on, though protective blue tarps that serve as roofs for many are a constant reminder of the work left to be done.
In the Quarter, uber chef Paul Prudhomme is blackening his signature redfish again. Bourbon House is shucking oysters, and Antoine's, the 166-year-old dining icon, is dishing up plates of Pompano Pontchartrain with slices of tart lemon.
Yet even here, Katrina has left her mark. All three restaurants are short-handed. Antoine's, which lost its $200,000 wine collection in the storm, is shifting its wine list away from French staples, embracing New World wines instead.
And look closely at the brass band playing outside Prudhomme's K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen: The golden sheen on the tuba is gone, lost in the deluge at the musician's house.
But in the flood zone, the destruction is not so subtle. Leave the French Quarter on Rampart and head east, toward the devastated Ninth and Lower Ninth wards and East New Orleans.
All around are the carcasses of flooded houses. Katrina laid waste to more than 215,000 homes. Many are abandoned, their doors wide open.
Only an estimated 189,000 of the city's roughly 500,000 pre-Katrina residents have returned. For now, the city is overwhelmingly whiter and more affluent than it was before.
Affordable housing is scarce, and FEMA has only filled 48,158 of the 90,000 trailer requests it's received from displaced families in Louisiana, leaving many to wait out their existence in places like Atlanta, Houston and Little Rock. With only 20 of 128 public schools now open, parents who can't afford to send their children to private schools have no choice but to live elsewhere.
Children who have returned must wade through wreckage to get to school. "You never really get used to it," said 18-year-old Mark Buchert, a senior at Brother Martin, an all-boys Catholic high school in the devastated Gentilly neighborhood.
The destruction gets worse. Keep driving as Rampart turns into St. Claude Avenue and you'll go six miles before you pass a working traffic light. Broken signals swing from their poles like men hanging from gallows. Others blink red. Elsewhere, they lie on their side in intersections, blinking yellow.
Even with a diminished population, traffic at rush-hour is heavy. Many people living elsewhere temporarily return to the city each day to work at their jobs or to work on their homes, so the main arteries in and out of town are clogged. Add to the mix the large trucks used for the cleanup, and a commute from suburban New Orleans to the central business district that took 10 minutes before the storm can take 45 minutes now.
At night, the darkness is pervasive. Six months after the storm made landfall Aug. 29, a little over a third of the structures in the city have electricity. Even fewer have hot water or cooking gas.
Past the Industrial Canal, even farther east, is the cement slab upon which Carolyn Berryhill's house used to sit. In the field of rubble,all that remains of her neighborhood in the Lower Ninth Ward, the 60-year-old "Miss Carolyn" recognizes the pieces of her house by their signature green color.
One piece of her home landed at the base of a nearby pecan tree, the same tree whose branches cradled Berryhill for 12 hours after a gush of water – the result of a broken levee – rushed into her parlor and blew apart her home like a bomb. She somehow floated to the tree and waved madly at rescuers in helicopters until they finally saw her and plucked her to safety.
In what used to be Berryhill's backyard, an unchipped porcelain plate is half-filled with a meal of mud. The earth is still spongy, as if it hasn't fully swallowed the storm's waters. In it, a golden doorknob is embedded as if it's about to open a door to the underworld. "A lot of people, they talk about coming back and rebuild," she said. "Rebuild what? What can you rebuild out of this? What can you salvage out of this?"
A half block away, she finds what she thinks might be her stove.
On a parallel street, 71-year-old Gloria Jordan warns that if you walk much farther, "you'll see things I pray to God you never see again."
It's a street where three people drowned in their attics, including a 12-year-old girl. Their bodies were found months later. "I have no appetite. It's hard to eat these days," says Jordan, frail like a leaf.
She joins her husband, Clarence, on what used to be their porch, now nothing but a concrete foundation. Jordan's eyes gladden as she remembers how each morning she used to sip her coffee in a rocking chair and look out across her small garden of flowers. She wishes she could remember their names.
For now, she and Clarence are living with their daughter in White Castle, 73 miles west of New Orleans.
"Baby, I had a beautiful home," said Jordan, who owned her house for 49 years. "It's hard when you lived on your own for so many years and just like you pop your finger, or in the twinkling of an eye, you're homeless."
Her property is exactly the way the hurricane left it: Her husband's suits were blown into a neighbor's yard, still on hangers. His truck is on its side. Still waiting for her insurance check, she hasn't even started clearing the debris.
Those who are rebuilding are largely the ones who can front the costs of repairs.
Contractor Darren Schmolke returned alone to his destroyed home after losing his wife in a car wreck during their evacuation to Florida. National Guard troops had roped off the posh Lakeview neighborhood where he raised his family.
Each time they chased him away, he would pretend to leave, walking instead around the block and returning through the back door. He worked nonstop to reassemble his house, a two-story colossus in granite, marble and brick. His neighborhood, where homes had water up to their roofs, is one of many that are now in limbo, waiting for government officials to determine whether residents can rebuild. "After I lost my wife, I couldn't sit around and wait," Schmolke said. "I had to do something to get some control back over my life."
Businesses that are rebuilding are running into another problem – a shortage of workers.
"Help Wanted" and "Now Hiring" signs are everywhere. They're in the windows of unpretentious delis as well as cultural landmarks like Cafe du Monde, the 144-year-old institution that for generations has served New Orleanians its iconic beignets.
Call any New Orleans Domino's and before you can order a pizza, you'll first be asked to listen to a 20-second message recruiting new drivers.
"The problem is more basic than `where are the people?' The problem is the people don't have anywhere to live," said Loren Scott, a professor emeritus of economics at Louisiana State University.
Corporations are housing workers in barge dorms, cruise ships, warehouses and converted train cars. Those that can afford to do so are buying trailers for their employees, as Paul Prudhomme did for everyone from his chief operating officer to his line cooks.
Susan Rudolph, a waitress at Cafe du Monde, slept in her truck when she first returned to the city – her husband in the driver's seat, she in the passenger seat, and all they own packed tightly behind them.
Now, she begins her day at dawn inside her FEMA-funded motel room, scouring the classifieds for an affordable apartment. With one-bedrooms going for $1,500 and with landlords asking for first and last month's rent plus a security deposit, getting into an apartment is a $4,500 investment – a tall order for someone waiting tables.
After a morning spent looking, she puts on a brave face and her white Cafe du Monde cap and smiles sweetly as she serves the hot-and-sticky beignets to chattering visitors.
"New Orleans has always been a tourist area, so we smile like clowns," Rudolph said. "I hope one day there won't be one tear in our eye."
N2890laba-
r nbx
LA LAbas LAol
BC-Katrina-Real Estate,1136
AP Photos of May 8: LACG101-102
AP Graphic KATRINA REAL ESTATE
AP Centerpiece: Post-Katrina real estate booming
By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI
Associated Press Writer
biz–topic:Government;biz–topic:Investment;
NEW ORLEANS (AP) – The 2,200-square-foot house promises three spacious bedrooms and two-and-a-half baths – a bargain at $175,000. Except for the fact that the home, located in one of this city's previously elegant neighborhoods, has been gutted to the studs and has no drywall, no wallboard, no fixtures.
"Home was flooded by Katrina," reads the advertisement posted by the listing agent at one of the city's largest real estate firms. "Ready to turn into your dream home."
The pitch is less far-fetched than it may seem: Although vast swaths of this hurricane-battered city are still without electricity and basic services, residential real estate sales are at a fever pitch, a shining spot in an otherwise struggling economy.
For the first quarter of the year, sales of single-family homes in the greater New Orleans area zoomed to $826 million, a jump of 60 percent over the first quarter of 2005, when sales totaled $517 million, according to New Orleans Metropolitan Association of Realtors; 3,829 residential units were sold, 960 more than the same period in 2005.
Experts say there's nothing to be surprised about: One of the ironies of natural disasters is they're often good for real estate. It's a pattern real estate professionals witnessed in Florida after Hurricane Andrew and in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Northridge earthquake.
"To use a terrible analogy, it's like watching 'Gone with the Wind' for the fifth time," said Arthur Sterbcow, president of Latter & Blum Inc., the 90-year-old real estate firm based in New Orleans. "It's completely predictable. The market reacts the same way each time. It's like watching a football game and having the play book in your hands."
Last year's play unfolded like this: As Hurricane Katrina bore down in late August, thousands fled.
Trying to stay close to home, many ended up putting down temporary roots in satellite communities like Baton Rouge, where evacuees pushed up residential sales 48 percent to $1.2 billion in 2005, compared to $788 million in 2004, according to the Greater Baton Rouge Association of Realtors.
But the pull of home is strong, and many evacuees have since returned to their flooded city.
Some were lucky enough to find their homes intact, needing only minor repairs. At the other end of the spectrum were people like Jim Peckenpaugh, 60, whose home in the upper-middle-class Lakeview neighborhood took on 9 feet of water.
He initially tried to find a dry house, but those in Lakeview were selling for more than $400,000, pricing him out of his own neighborhood. Instead, he found a bargain: a three-bedroom, also in Lakeview, selling for $250,000. That's because it swallowed only 3 inches of water.
It wasn't his first choice – the first flooded house he tried to buy was snatched up by a more aggressive buyer. "At night, as I was driving around looking at houses, I would see people with flashlights doing the same thing," he said.
Most returning homeowners bought dry properties in the unharmed periphery of the city.
As those homes became scarce, more intrepid homeowners, as well as investors, began working their way toward the core of the city, say real estate agents and developers. National homebuilder KB Home has acquired 58 finished lots in New Orleans, as well as a 3,000-acre parcel in Jefferson Parish, a neighboring suburb.
"You hate to say it, but these disasters tend to spark an energy that people have to respond to," said Thomas Stevens, president of the Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Realtors. "Immediately after, what you see is this sense of, 'Oh my God, it's a disaster. What do we do?' And then people's lives get back to normal and they say, 'OK, I have a home. Do I repair it? Or do I sell it and buy another?'"
To be sure, the real estate picture is far from even: Areas like St. Bernard Parish, which took the brunt of last summer's storm, are lying fallow. Not a single house sold in the first three months after the storm; only one sold in the fourth month, fetching just $11,000 in an area where the average home once sold for $109,000, the New Orleans Realtors Association said.
The most heavily damaged neighborhoods are still in limbo: In order to get insurance, some homes will have to be raised as much as 3 feet, an expensive proposition. Rather than going through the expense and hassle of having their homes raised, many homeowners are choosing to buy in the city's less damaged neighborhoods, fueling sales there.
Although real estate transactions in many Gulf Coast firms are setting records, the road to ownership post-Katrina is far from smooth – especially on the insurance front.
Both State Farm Insurance Co. and Allstate Corp., the nation's No. 1 and No. 2 insurers that together controlled over half the homeowners' insurance market in Louisiana pre-Katrina, have stopped writing new policies in New Orleans, the companies said. Finding affordable insurance is a struggle.
"I basically went down the list and called every single insurance company I could find. No one is writing in Orleans Parish right now," said Robert Boulanger, who's in the process of closing on an unflooded house just outside the French Quarter, one of the city's most desirable neighborhoods dating to the 1700s.
With private insurers pulling out, buyers are overwhelmingly forced to seek coverage from the state-run Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corp., which charges higher rates than its private-sector competitors. For 28-year-old Boulanger, a construction manager, that means he'll pay over $4,000 this coming year to insure the home he's buying for $240,000.
"It's really pushing the envelope of what I can afford," he said.
In flooded neighborhoods throughout the city, "For Sale" signs are sprouting from gray lawns, beside mounds of stripped wallboard. With doors punched in, Realtors advise prospective buyers to simply walk in: "Easy to show. Door is open," says one ad for a flooded, white shotgun.
Other ads promise the chance to own "the house of your dreams," as did the Coldwell Banker ad for the 2,200-square-foot home that caught the attention of 24-year-old Autumn Nurton.
"Before the storm, I could never have afforded a house like this. It's the house I've always wanted and now I can afford it," said the exuberant young woman. "I have to do the work, but in a sense that's even better because I can put myself into it. I've already sort of moved in in my heart."
n3722lala-
r nbx
LA LAbas LAol
BC-LA--Katrina's Children,2059
Amid the ruins, Katrina's children struggle
Eds: Also moved in advance on state and national wires. For Custom News and Multimedia subscribers, a gallery of audio slideshows on children affected by Katrina is available in the katrina–children folder inside the –national folder.
With AP Photos of April 19: NY420-429
By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI
Associated Press Writer
NEW ORLEANS (AP) – Each time the 3-year-old gets in the bathtub, she thinks she's going to drown. Monica whimpers when her grandmother turns on the faucet, sobbing softly at first, then wailing as the tub begins to fill.
"She cries and cries. 'Don't be crying,' I tell her. 'I gotta wash your hair,'" says her exasperated grandmother, Ruth May Smith.
There's no use telling her she won't drown; the word isn't yet part of the toddler's vocabulary. And it won't do much good to tell her that grandma will take care of her, either; Monica learned the hard way that those she loves can't always protect her.
There were seven children inside the family's Gulf Coast home on Aug. 29 when the 30-foot wave, unleashed by Hurricane Katrina, crashed down upon it. As the walls began to crumble, the older children swam out. Monica, the littlest, was still inside with her grandmother and two aunts. None could swim.
The toddler went under. She would have drowned if not for a family friend who dove in, fished her out and placed her inside a floating cooler.
In her plastic ark, the girl bobbed to safety – but the storm's high water mark is still imprinted inside her, as it is in thousands of others who survived the storm.
Some 1.2 million children under 18 were living in counties rendered disaster zones by Katrina. As many as 8 percent, or 100,000, are expected to develop post-traumatic stress disorder, according to one assessment.
Most experts say the toll is likely far higher. Of the first 1,000 children screened by the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, 27 percent displayed symptoms of trauma, including nightmares, flashbacks, heightened anxiety and bedwetting, says Dr. Joy Osofsky, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at LSU's Harris Center for Infant Mental Health.
A study by the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and the Children's Health Fund compared children displaced by Katrina with other kids surveyed in urban Louisiana in 2003. Katrina's victims were more than twice as likely to have behavioral or conduct problems; the same was true of depression or anxiety.
How children respond and the severity of their reaction varies widely. But eight months after Katrina, patterns are beginning to surface.
For teenagers, depression is setting in, as they realize it could be years before they're back in their homes, if ever.
Elementary- and middle-school children are struggling with the loss of their toys. They battle nightmares and intrusive thoughts. Their anxiety comes out in physical symptoms, like recurring stomach aches.
For children under 6, their faith in their parents' ability to protect them has been shattered. To make themselves feel secure, they regress, sticking close to their parents and returning to behavior they'd previously outgrown, such as thumbsucking and bedwetting.
"Huffing and puffing and blowing your house down is only supposed to happen in fairy tales. Now, anything can happen," says Dr. Lynne Rubin, a founding member of the New York Disaster Counseling Coalition, which counseled children after 9/11.
–––
During the London blitz in World War II, Anna Freud, the daughter of the famed psychoanalyst, observed that children sent to safe homes in the countryside fared worse than those who waited out the bombings in shelters alongside their mothers.
It was the separation, rather than the exposure to the war, that proved more traumatic.
More than 5,000 children were separated from their families in the hectic days after Katrina made landfall, according to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Those who lost a parent often become unmoored, focusing their angst on their surviving parent.
When her father takes a nap, 8-year-old Gabrielle Riley circles the bedroom, on edge. Eventually, she quietly turns the doorknob. "I just go in his room and see if he's OK. But sometimes he don't answer me so I just scream loud, 'Daddy are you OK?'" she explains.
Gabrielle's mother caught pneumonia during the family's evacuation to Houston and died in her sleep. Ever since, Gabrielle has been unable to fall asleep by herself, curling up with her grandmother, instead. It's a recurring pattern, say child psychologists, as children retreat into what is most familiar.
More than 60 years ago, Anna Freud had a second observation: While children who hunkered down in London's bomb shelters with their guardian fared better emotionally than those sent out of harm's way, the children who did best of all were those whose mothers stayed calm. If the mother showed fear, the child sensed the threat implicitly – and symptoms of trauma surfaced later.
Like youngsters in London, many child victims of the story sensed the threat in their parents' reaction and, in Katrina's aftermath, in TV footage.
April Ocker didn't let her daughter out of her sight during the hurricane. But since then, 5-year-old Breanna has harbored a horrible fear: "I'm afraid my Mommy is going to go away and not come back," says the little girl, her brown bangs covering saucer-like eyes.
Sitting nearby, her mother tries to comfort her, stroking her hair. But it's hard to reassure a child who saw trees crashing around her family's trailer, parked 5 1/2 miles from the beach in Pass Christian on Mississippi's Gulf Coast. Katrina nearly wiped the quaint city off the map.
With the hurricane bearing down, April placed Breanna and her 8-year-old brother inside the trailer's bathtub, hoping the tub's strong walls would protect them. The tub survived, but the children are scarred.
When it rains, Breanna says, she hides under the coffee table. She can fall asleep only in her mother's bed; she trails her mother like a shadow. April occasionally gets called to Breanna's school, three minutes from home, because of the girl's sobbing.
April has taken a job at the local Boys & Girls Club, which runs an after-school program for children, so she can be near Breanna in the afternoons.
Breanna describes the hurricane like this: "It sounds like a monster."
It's a monster that's never far away. Even in her mother's arms sleeping at night, Breanna says she often has nightmares.
"A monster is running after me. There's a bear, too," she says.
–––
For adults, the hurricane's damage is the twisted houses, ripped from their foundations, and such things as bloated couches, spit out onto the street.
For their children, it's the muddy teddy bear and the headless stuffed rabbit, poking out of the rubble of one ruined house. It's the baby doll lying in another heap, her arms raised above her head, as if waiting to be picked up. It's the stuffed frog impaled on a radiator fan and the alphabet magnets still adhering to the side of a toppled refrigerator.
A beloved toy is much more than a physical object for a child.
"If you lose a favorite teddy bear, you haven't just lost a toy. You've lost one of the means by which you keep yourself feeling safe," says Dr. Claude Chemtob, a clinical professor of psychology and pediatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
But the loss extends far beyond their favorite teddy bear.
For Katrina's children, their destroyed homes have become their Ground Zero. They go back again and again, sifting through the rubble, looking for tiny pieces of their rooms. They mourn each destroyed toy, each fragment of a school art project, each mottled action figure.
Objects that were insignificant before the storm have become loaded with meaning.
Like the pink, plastic barrette 10-year-old Jasmine Lombard found on the dank carpet of her flooded room. It's the kind sold by the dozen for $3.99 at the corner grocery.
Returning for the first time, Jasmine spotted the barrette and picked it up. She held it close in her cupped hands, as if she'd stumbled across a family heirloom. "This is the only memory I have of this entire neighborhood," she says.
Some kids – like 6-year-old Michael Watts, Jasmine's next-door neighbor – are taking matters into their own hands. As the storm approached, he did what his parents told him: Pack a single bag. Don't take more than a few day's worth of clothes.
He returned to find his toys caked in mud.
That's when he asked his parents for a suitcase, one with wheels and a handle. In it, he began storing every new toy he was given since the storm.
Now, he doesn't let the suitcase out of his sight, lugging it behind him on errands, to the store, to restaurants and to sleep-overs. Inside are his treasures: Sponge Bob and Batman. A Game Boy. A growing collection of plastic, Hulk-like men.
It annoys his grandmother, Deirdre Domino. No more taking the suitcase to school, she says.
"I tell him, 'Michael, take out a few and take them with us,'" Domino says. "He says 'Mawmaw, what if we have another hurricane?'"
–––
"Make no mistake: This is a crisis and it should be dealt with as an emergency," says Marian Wright Edelman, the founder and president of the Washington, D.C.-based Children's Defense Fund, which in a recently released report called for immediate emergency mental health services in the Gulf states.
Overwhelmed, child psychologists in New Orleans say case loads have doubled, both because of the heightened need and because so many doctors have not returned. "I used to be able to book a new child within two weeks. Now, I'm booking appointments two months out," says child psychologist Carlos Reinoso, author of the book "Little Ducky Jr. and the Whirlwind Storm," which tries to explain the hurricane to children.
What mental health professionals fear most is the impact down the road. The 1988 earthquake in Armenia that killed 25,000 people. Tracking more than 200 children over five years, researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles' Trauma Psychiatry Program found that those who were given professional help early on fared better and showed fewer symptoms at the end of the study. Those who got no help did not improve.
A child such as 3-year-old Monica – so traumatized she thinks she's going to drown in a bathtub – clearly needs help, says Dr. Bruce Perry, a senior fellow at the Child Trauma Academy in Houston. Without it, he says, she risks a future of drug and alcohol abuse, high blood pressure, crime and child abuse.
"This crisis is foreseeable, and much of its destructive impact is preventable," Perry says. "Yet our society may not have the wisdom to see that the real crisis of Katrina is the hundreds of thousands of ravaged, displaced and traumatized children."
Some may already be beyond help.
No one noticed that a 14-year-old girl in Pass Christian – once a straight-A student – had stopped reading since Katrina.
The girl, who asked that she not be identified because she felt embarrassed, used to lose herself in books. "I would picture myself as the main character in whatever I was reading. I read so much that I would lose track of time," she says.
Now, she has a hard time concentrating. Horrible images intrude as she reads.
She remembers the drowned man, impaled on his plywood fence. She pictures her favorite skirt high up in the branches of a tree.
Last month, she locked herself inside the bathroom of her family's FEMA trailer and lifted a bottle of Lysol to her lips. Her mother found her passed out on the toilet seat, her head leaning against the trailer's plastic wall, the floor slick with the disinfectant.
The girl recovered from the suicide attempt, but her family doesn't have the resources to get her professional help, relying instead on teachers and school counselors.
To this girl, the world is a tunnel of darkness. She sees no way out.
"It's like I can't see my future anymore," she says.
N4089laba-
r nbx
LA LAbas LAol
BC-Katrina-Insurance, 1st Ld-Writethru,1531
Insurance limbo delays rebuilding of Gulf Coast
Eds: SUBS 7th graf, "It's basically..." to fix grammar. Also moved in advance.
By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI
Associated Press Writer
AP Photos of June 9: LAAB105-110
biz–topic:Financing;biz–topic:Investment;biz–topic:Lawsuits;;
NEW ORLEANS (AP) – The owners of the sagging, flood-stained home aren't in. Above the front door, a banner explains their absence, and the lack of progress: "Allstate paid $10,113.34 on this house for storm damage."
Like the home next to it and the one after that, the house was disemboweled nine months ago by Hurricane Katrina. The force of the gushing water punched the refrigerator into the kitchen wall, and it still sits leaning through the house's broken ribcage. Inside, mud has hardened into a crusty carpet, covering a designer sofa and a leather swivel chair.
"I want people to drive by my home and decide for themselves: Could I repair this for $10,000?" asks Eric Moskau, the home's exiled owner who had over $1.2 million in coverage on his 3,000-square-foot home.
Behind the sign he hung from his porch is a story all-too-common in this once-posh neighborhood of pummeled homes: Even New Orleans' affluent homeowners, who thought they had done the right thing by properly insuring their investment, are finding that technicalities are keeping them from securing enough from their insurers to rebuild.
The insurance industry says it has settled over 90 percent of its Hurricane Katrina claims, proving it's meeting its obligations to policyholders. But consumer advocates say insurers settled numerous claims for only a fraction of the actual damages, using numerous exclusions to reduce payouts. Insurance modeling firm ISO estimates Louisiana had $24.3 billion in insured losses, but the state department of insurance says only $12.5 billion had been paid out as of the end of April, the last month for which figures were available.
Without enough money from their insurers to rebuild, homeowners are left with two choices: Give up and leave, or else rebuild by hand, using their savings to pay for labor and materials.
"It's basically self-insurance," said Moskau, who had what he thought was plenty of coverage on his $600,000 two-story house and now counts himself among those who have abandoned their homes on once-stylish Bellaire Avenue.
Exactly 63 buckled, warped and mud-filled homes separate Moskau from the nearest neighbor who is now repairing his home. "With this," says 79-year-old Pascal Warner, holding up his large, lined hands, as the light streams in through the ribs of his still unfinished walls.
He and his 71-year-old wife, Irma, have dragged their sopping furniture to the curb, ripped the wet wallboard off the walls and stripped the house to the studs. With only a pittance from their homeowner's insurance, they had just enough money for supplies, not labor.
After last year's floodwaters receded, politicians initially blamed the residents of this below-sea-level city, claiming too few had purchased federal flood insurance on top of their homeowners policies, which cover only wind damage.
Yet an analysis by the office of Donald Powell, the Bush administration's Gulf Coast recovery czar, found few communities were better insured against flooding than New Orleans: Two out of three homes had flood insurance, 13 times more than the national average of 5 percent. It's also far more than in many other communities historically prone to flooding. For example, Harris County, Texas, has one of the highest rates of repetitive flooding in the nation and yet only a quarter of homeowners have flood coverage.
Moskau, a well-to-do real estate appraiser, thought he had taken every precaution: He had the maximum federal flood insurance of $250,000. But when the government issued that check, it was issued in two names: Moskau's and his bank's. His bank applied the check to his $600,000 mortgage, leaving him with an outstanding note of $350,000 and no money for repairs.
According to a spokesman at Freddie Mac, which over the last five years has bought over $7.5 billion in mortgages in Louisiana, banks are required to put insurance checks into an escrow account, disbursing the funds as repairs are completed. An exception is allowed if the home is in an area where rebuilding has been prohibited. In that case, the insurance check can be applied to the outstanding mortgage, said spokesman Brad German.
Flanking one of the city's buckled levees, portions of Bellaire Avenue are still in rebuilding limbo.
Warner, who has lived in the same ranch-style house for 40 years, had just $3,000 after his flood insurance settlement was used to pay off his remaining mortgage. He also received around $18,000 from his homeowners for wind damage, enough for construction materials but not labor.
Moskau's house, like most on Bellaire, swallowed less than 6 feet of water. It was enough to destroy the first floor, but not the second. The second floor, however, got wet, too. Water seeped in through the vents, pushed in by the hurricane's 140 mile-per-hour winds, he said. The roof was damaged and windows were punched out – damage, says Moskau, which should be covered under the wind-only policy. Allstate told him it was all due to flooding.
"I agree that the first floor flooded. I used to be an insurance adjuster and I know the rules, so I didn't expect Allstate to pay me for that. But the second floor clearly didn't. So shouldn't I at least get 50 percent of my policy?" asked Moskau. He said that would be enough to pay off the mortgage and cover much of the rebuilding cost.
The CEOs of the State Farm Insurance Co. and Allstate Corp., the nation's No. 1 and No. 2 insurers, declined to discuss specific claims. Together, they control half the insurance market in Louisiana.
"When you track our claim satisfaction, it is very high in those areas. Ninety-three to 94 percent of our Katrina claims have been settled," said Allstate CEO Edward M. Liddy.
That hasn't stopped critical reviews by insurance regulators and lawsuits by policyholders.
Louisiana's top insurance regulator recently ordered reviews of consumer complaints regarding Allstate and St. Paul Travelers Cos. In District Court in New Orleans, a class action lawsuit was filed last month against 15 insurers, claiming they capriciously denied claims.
In Mississippi, U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, whose Pascagoula home was torn off its foundation, is joining hundreds of his constituents in suing State Farm for unpaid wind damage.
Part of what really rankles consumers is the record profits property-and-casualty insurers are posting despite the unprecedented losses inflicted by Katrina.
The industry cleared a $43 billion profit in 2005, an 11.7 percent increase over the previous year and a 15-year high, according to the trade group, the Insurance Information Institute.
"I would say it's definitely good times in the property-and-casualty insurance industry," said Donald Light, a senior analyst at Celent LLC, a research and consulting firm.
But insurers say the profit numbers are only half the story: Nearly half the $58 billion in insured losses along the Gulf Coast resulting from last year's hurricanes were absorbed by reinsurers, companies that insure insurance companies.
Those same reinsurers are now jacking the rates they charge insurance companies by an average 80 percent in coastal regions, according to an analysis by Guy Carpenter & Co., a division of insurance-brokerage firm Marsh & McLennan Cos.
For some companies, the price has tripled: Allstate will spend $600 million on reinsurance this year, compared to under $200 million in 2005. To offset that cost, Allstate announced plans to seek premium increases in a majority of the 49 states in which it operates. It also canceled 30,000 policies in coastal counties of New York, including Brooklyn, even though a major hurricane has not hit there since 1938.
In the past year in Florida, insurers have left the state by the dozen, while those that are staying are seeking steep rate increases. State Farm is seeking a 70 percent hike in premiums.
"We're paying the price for hurricanes that hit thousands of miles away from New England," said George A. Cole III, Senior Vice President of Massachusetts-based Hingham Mutual. Cole explained that the company had no choice but to cancel 6,500 of their customers, most on Cape Cod, after being hit with a 50 percent rate increase from their own reinsurer.
Back in New Orleans, homeowners fight over money and the fret over deep financial losses is taking an emotional toll.
Moskau, who is living in Idaho with his wife and two boys, literally hasn't been able to sit still since Allstate cut him the check for $10,113.34 several months ago. He still does not know what to do with his buckled home, for which he is still paying a $3,500-a-month mortgage, and is instead making plans to build a new house an hour's drive outside New Orleans.
"My wife is always telling me, 'Will you please stop moving your foot?' We'll be sitting at the lunch table and the whole thing is moving," he said. "All from the anxiety."